Read Online World War Two Will Not Take Place by Bill James - Free Book Online

though, Mount’s ardent shilly-shallying didn’t matter. He foot-leathered around the big buildings and wide streets, staring everywhere, as if seeing it all for the first time. His staring never found Eisen-Toulmin. Accosting wasn’t offered.
    After the third evening’s dud duty, Mount went to the Toledo club, hoping Toulmin might have by now come back to Inge and Olga. Perhaps he had somehow missed him around the Wilhelmstrasse. Perhaps Toulmin had been ill at home or even in hospital. Inge wasn’t present in the club. She had several appointments of a charmingly established type every other Tuesday, Olga said – consecutive bookings. They had not seen Toulmin. Mount and Olga drank rum and blackcurrant together at the bar. She seemed to think he might like her to return to the apartment with him. ‘Inge does not take her accessories with her for the Tuesday appointments. They are not required. These clients are elderly and physically limited in what they can do. Inge leaves her accessories here behind the bar. I am certainly entitled to borrow them,’ she said in a pleasantly inquiring tone.
    He’d make sure no further chair breakage occurred. Tomorrow, when she had left after breakfast, he must take the underground again, this time to the eastern suburbs where Toulmin had a flat in the Lichtenberg district. A loiter here might be more risky – the same sort of possibilities, but stronger. If something bad had happened to him, his home could be under watch, in the hope of catching contacts like Mount. Toulmin, who was Eisen, lived alone after a divorce, or lived alone last time his dossier was adjusted. No children.
    Mount had his details on recall: address, home telephone number, real name – Konrad Paul Eisen – former wife’s name, political sympathies, career stages to date, present salary, parents, siblings; nothing written. Notes were peril. To offset the need for them, there had been two days in training given to memory exercises and tests. Besides those word-for-word extracts from his ‘Psychological Silhouette’, he could still recite a big slab of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy , one paragraph of it backwards, starting with ‘laughter of occasion ridiculous or cause such no’, instead of ‘no such cause or ridiculous occasion of laughter’. Oliver Fallows, in the Section, could do the first half of Browning’s poem ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ – in English, ‘Friar Lippo Lippi’ – backwards, and would, if you encouraged him, finishing on the title, ‘Lippi Lippo Fra’, which he thought had a better ring to it than the original.

FOUR
    A n officer in the field had a lot of autonomy, and Mount decided he needed no authorization from London to burgle Toulmin’s place. ‘ Please, sir, may I spin his drum? ’ Serfish. Of course, he hoped a break-in would not be necessary. He’d walk the streets around where Toulmin lived in the hope of seeing him coming or going, just as he had walked the streets around the Foreign Office. But if this search also failed he might have to get inside the apartment somehow.
    His training course had spent a week on how to break into properties and do a thorough rummage – so, clearly, they expected you to break into properties and do a thorough rummage some time, times. He’d been issued with very effective ‘children’, as lock-busting equipment was known. The term came from rhyming slang: children = boys and girls = twirls, slang for skeleton keys. But he guessed that a request now for permission to pop into Toulmin’s nest on the quiet would be refused. He’d never convince Stephen Bilson the urgency justified the risk. After all, the real impulse came from Inge and Olga and their anxieties over Toulmin’s untreated congestion, apparently made worse by hitting the floor in the furniture mishap with Olga on top of him. SB was